All This And Winter Of Discontent 2

I’m relatively sure that my memories are jumbled to the point where the visits didn’t all happen at Christmas, but I remember being small, somewhere between eight and eleven, and some of my parents’ friends visiting. Not exactly exciting in and itself, but these friends had left Britain for far-off lands; Nigeria, South Africa1. And again, my memory is probably faulty and skipping over things, but I remember conversations about how Britain was broken and the only cure was to let the Tories do more. Which my parents would naturally counter and argue back on how they were wrong, at least about the latter part. I always thought it was weird. After all, I would go to the shops every week, CBBC always had great programmes on, Radio 1 was likely playing Fleetwood Mac2.

Our house was (and still is!) in a late 1970s and early 1980s housing estate; before the big Barrett Boom of the mid-80s onwards, meaning that we had big patches of greenery all over the place. A large field capable of supporting a non-regulation football match, a basketball court and a set of swings where all the teenagers would hang out late into the night (augmented by an insane zip line in my absence, though in recent years the council has discovered it doesn’t actually own the field, which is a slight problem…). A patch of land by the side of our street filled with four massive trees which were seemingly custom grown for hideouts and climbing. We imaginatively called “The Trees”. At the other end of the affair, a large, multi-street linear strip of grass and woods separated the far edge of the estate from the main road beyond, a thick tree line forming a barrier. Places to explore on your BMX bikes.

As we came home from the airport this year, twisting through the new roads that simply didn’t exist when I was little, through the new 2010-20 estate of £600,000 houses that are shabbily terraced together and already look like they’re falling apart, we turned across the Middleton Stoney road and I saw something that I had never ever seen before.

Tents. In the tree line. -8ºC outside and tents in the tree line.

It’s a country I obviously recognize. It hasn’t descended into some V For Vendetta otherworld. But it just all seems completely and utterly broken. Ambulances queued ten deep outside A&E for hours with sick patients inside but there’s no room for them inside, cracked shop fronts, and queues at the pharmacy that spill out of the building.

I went to London for the first time since 2019. There were things to see, and I desperately wanted one of those chorizo sandwiches again.

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There’s not much left of Robin Hood Gardens now; just a few pieces remaining, jealously guarded by hi-vis jackets to prevent anybody thinking of using them in the cold winter weather. And, I’m sorry, but you can be as tradarch as you like, but the Station Square buildings above made me so angry that morning, to the point where I was muttering loudly into my mask and flicking Vs at the Blackwall Reach showroom. Say what you will about RHG, but it had a purpose, it had intent, it was made specifically for that area, and its form was unique. And now large sections are gone and replaced with what? Buildings that have not one single spark of wit or imagination in them; “An exclusive collection of 242 spacious and dynamic apartments. A haven for those looking to indulge in the London Lifestyle.” A lifeless cube that impressively manages to be worse than all the traditional arguments against Brutalism. So if you saw a muttering man acting like Alec Guinness at the start of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on the DLR that morning, it was probably me.

I fled to the Barbican. Because where else would you go? Kids having snowball fights in the streets in the sky, the towers looking amazing covered in snow and frost, the Centre bustling with a Christmas staff function and revelling in its community. This is what we could have had. With money, with care, with a will to make it work. A straight run from Beau Brummell to Bauhaus.

But this is what we have. Battersea Power Station. One of the most striking buildings in London, an Art Deco masterpiece that projected power across the city. You could have done so much with this piece of London’s history. But instead, it has been enclosed and turned into a big box for upscale retail. Once it supplied the city, now it has Rolex and Genesis showrooms to extract money from tourists. Alongside the redevelopment, Gehry’s Prospect Place sits uneasily, out of place next to the monument of industrial power, while looking hungrily at the 1950s housing estate and pub across the road. If you saw a masked man leaving the station loudly saying “This is perhaps the worst thing I have seen in years” before angrily stomping to the tube just before Christmas, well, that was probably me too.

But let’s finish London on a positive note. The Elizabeth Line really does live up to the hype; it is a breathtaking public works project that you just don’t believe can happen anymore.3 But here it is, and it works. While the modern Jubilee Line stations are a lovely blend of PoMo and High-Tech with their enclosed metal corridors that make you feel like you’re walking through a TARDIS that crashed into the centre of London4, the Elizabeth Line stations are monumental, playful, and brutalist. The sublime is embraced with massive curved concrete ceilings, everything is vast, clean, and accessible. Escalators run at a seemingly impossible gradient, and damn, it’s just amazing. If the Astoria had to go, better that it was torn down to make this possible rather than its likely fate of being turned into Zone 1 luxury flats.

And I know it’s fairly tempting to respond with “yeah, but America sucks too!” But I am not disagreeing with that! It’s not like you’ll find me writing an ode to the US health system any time soon. But you have to understand that Britain is not doing well:

At least the strikes seem to be popular, with BBC interviews of the nurses’ strikes often being drowned out by people beeping their car horns in support of the picket lines. But then you also get people that you don’t expect pushing DeSantis’s Florida and referencing a ivermectin-pushing YouTube crank. Or the suggestion that privatising more of the NHS would help.

Back home again now. It took me a solid day to get used to my house again, and the post office brought me free COVID tests and all my post after the free hold service ended. Just imagine, a post office owned by the state which can do things like replacing large chunks of its fleet with electric vehicles. All done in the country of High Capitalism.


  1. Standard Spitting Image reference goes here. ↩︎

  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6VBE1oboK8 Naturally. ↩︎

  3. It’s probably telling that it was set into motion by the last Labour Government. ↩︎

  4. I highly recommend Southwark and Westminster stations… ↩︎